FutureScenes™ Trend Sheets

Working on your strategy? Hosting an ideation event? Building a future-oriented culture? These scenes from the future will engage your team and focus your business on what will be.

Future Insight as a Competitive Weapon

How well does your business understand the future when developing strategy or new products? Future scenario planning has never been more important… for three reasons.

Foresight Wins Battles: In the classic, Competing for the Future, Hamel and Prahalad explained three stages of competition: 1) competing for industry foresight, 2) competing to build capabilities for that future, and 3) competing for market share. Companies that just “show up” in Stage 3 have already lost to prepared competitors.

The Future is Knowable: OK, so we never got those flying cars. But in The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly argues that when we understand the intrinsic nature of technologies, we can confidently predict the future. Example: The dangerous nature of steam power predestined our 1800’s shift from cottage industries to factories.

Change is Swift & Punishing: Observe Uber, Amazon, Tesla, Apple: Today, barriers to competition look more like invitations to disruption. If you make physical products, someone may “Uber” you by surrounding their product with amazing services based on the internet-of-things and artificial intelligence. Maybe soon.

FutureScenes™ Trend Sheets

Now you can help your team “visit the future” with 16 FutureScenes sheets. Each two-page overview quickly makes you aware and conversant about your future. While not exhaustive, they trigger fresh thinking and show you where to dig deeper.

Planning an idea-generation session? Distribute these ahead of time, and tell participants their “admission ticket” is returning 3 or 4 sheets with their ideas. These sheets can trigger game-changing thinking before and during your ideation event.

Each sheet is a Microsoft Word® form, so employees can score the scenario’s positive or negative impact on their business. Each sheet includes broad implications for businesses in general. On page 2, your people can record implications and ideas for your business.

Other uses? Distribute a new FutureScenes sheet weekly. You’ll build a forward-thinking culture and give employees “raw material” for exciting innovation. Are you conducting market research? Don’t just consider what has happened. Consider what will happen.

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Is your business ready for these future scenarios?

You may be tempted to “spoon-feed” employees with just those scenarios you think are relevant. But future trends have many non-obvious implications no single person can imagine. Better to “crowd source” idea generation by exposing employees to a variety of future scenarios. Consider this small sampling of possible upsides and downsides…